Joy in the Ugly Process

 Today I sat on a panel of colleagues at a "Meet the Professor" activity hosted by the English student committee. It was awesome! Such bright and interested English majors.

Meanwhile, I was sitting there, a middle-aged woman, on a panel of people who had "arrived." They had reached their destination. Each of them took a moment and explained how they had succeeded, how they had found acceptance. Even those who had detoured through other paths before they got what they wanted described those detours as some kind of success: some successfully raised families, some had other jobs, etc. Some were convinced that it was because of a particular habit or capability. For several minutes, I just sat there feeling horrible, right in the middle of this impressive panel. I should have stayed silent.

Blerg. I can't stay silent. I'm not that wise. So I added my two cents: I explained that I would tell them something the others would not: that sometimes you don't arrive, and that you have to learn how to enjoy what happens instead.

I didn't say it very well. In fact, I said it very badly. But it's an idea that bears repeating.

People who succeed at capitalism are not the right people to ask about success: they're often inclined to attribute personal virtues to things that are, in fact, largely luck. I fail at nearly everything, and I can teach students *one thing: to enjoy failure.

Life is much more difficult for some people than others. Life straight up sucks for some people, whether they struggle or not. Studying the Old Testament shows us a whole pattern of people who attribute their financial success to their favor with God, and the contemporary temptation is to attribute that favor to the person's virtue, and suddenly voila! You have Prosperity heresy. 

An additional trap is the belief that good people are happy and vice versa. It becomes Toxic Positivity very quickly. What I propose is neither an emphasis on mood nor a false correlation between success and anything else. I think that there's a reason to see joy (not happiness, necessarily, though it's possible) in failure.

If you are religious, then you are probably familiar with the process of repentance. My own experience with that mechanism of making amends for what we can, of approaching God with everything else, and of being at the mercy of Jesus's Atonement teaches me, as often as I use it, the joy inherent in that. Even when I'm cut off from the Spirit for my bad decisions, I feel confident and assured that I know the way forward, and that there IS a way forward. This pattern is not a perfect parallel, but is reminiscent of the possibilities in more worldly failures.

I want to be very clear that I am not saying that there's purpose in suffering - that if we look hard enough, God is teaching us something in every adversity. I find that notion absurd and extreme. To be specific, I find that notion chronologically backwards. Instead, I would suggest that if you want God to be part of your adversity, then let him sanctify it. The adversity itself is just adversity. God doesn't enjoy our misery, nor does he directly cause it, gardener or no. Agency and coincidence are real, and I believe in both.

What if the person you married made bad decisions, and suddenly you're untethered to your home and future, in a bitter custody battle for your children? What if you fail out of school? What if nobody wants you? What if you've been abused by all of the men in your life? What if nobody will hire you, let alone the people you want to work for? What if your older sibling dies in a police shooting? What if your addiction bankrupts you and your family are suddenly homeless? What if a larger country attacks your homeland, and you stay to defend it with your life while your children flee to the west?

And for our students: what if you don't get the career you wanted? Or what if you do get it, and find you don't want it? Or find that you aren't good enough for it?

It sucks. It just plain sucks, no matter whose fault it is.

All that suckage? It's raw material. Just surviving has given you a rough draft. When you've had time to heal, gotten your wind back, and eaten some ice cream, you can make something awesome out of it. And if you let God help, you might even feel awesome about it, too. And then, if the pattern holds, you'll decide that it's what you actually always wanted, and you achieved this success because you're #soblessed, which is code for #sogoodatthis, because humans human. *shrug*

*I can, in fact, teach students a lot of things, because I am lucky enough to have had the opportunity to work hard for a PhD.